The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

Post by tzs » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 12:43 PM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #245

tzs wrote: post #40

I wish that people who reviewed devices with handwriting support would include some pictures showing math writing. Throw in an electronics schematic diagram or two, also. I want to know how well the thing works as a STEM writing scratchpad. If it can handle math and electronics reasonably well, that should be sufficient for most STEM.

Same here. I asked about exactly that a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15544996 Math writing needs a much higher resolution than ordinary text. For example if you are writing 2^2^2 the last 2 is really small. You also need a larger surface area so that you can draw diagrams and layout your calculations exactly as you want. I haven't tried ReMarkable myself, but from what I've heard, for math it…

Post by lima » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #237

thaumaturgy wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a variety of pretty big engineering challenges to solve: getting the form factor right, making sure your hand didn't interfere with the screen while using it, getting the pen-and-paper feel right, and getting the e-ink refresh rate down to where you could draw and write on it and have it feel natural. I'm fine with them choosing to solve those challenges instead of supporting USB mass storage.

...and designing, developing, and supporting your own custom application and its associated protocol isn't an "engineering challenge"? USB mass storage requires exposing a block device with a filesystem, which is error-prone and complex. The point is, USBMS is a solved problem. My MP3/MP4 players, my Android phone, my satnav, even my soldering iron [1] can do it. The Linux kernel, which reMarkable uses, already inclu…

Post by lima » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #252

lima wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can SSH into the device and change a config file. This is a hacker's dream indeed.

How fast is the data transfer? Do you think one could hack it into a "screen" by streaming a black-and-white image data from a computer to it? So the connected computer would do all the heavy lifting related to rendering, compress the result to something that is really easy to decompress, send it over, and tablet would just decompress a bitmap and blit it to the screen?

Post by JasonFruit » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 8:18 PM UTC

RepressedEmu wrote: post #256

JasonFruit wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Papertop. (It's a working title.)

Have you written any kind of blog or documentation about the build? I've been interested in a mini-laptop e-ink solution for a while. I think that most of the coding I do takes very little resources and is primarily just talking to the cloud or other servers. No reason to lug around a bunch of resources I don't need, right?

Post by PeCaN » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 3:34 AM UTC

blub wrote: post #49

hueving wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want the opposite. No cloud dependencies. Always-connected is a plague on modern computing that has ruined the experience for anyone with slow computers and/or unreliable networks. If you proposed a 3MB web page with 300ms API calls for every action and called that a replacement for an app for anyone with an unreliable/heavily metered connection you would be laughed out of the room. Yet that's the status quo of 'mo…

The Sony DPT-RP1 is a large e-ink reading device that works offline, but it's not available in Europe, just Japan and US. And of course they're getting some poor reviews for not having some bullshit cloud sync. Edit: I've heard Sony takes some privacy liberties with their EULA, so check that and maybe block their desktop app from connecting to the internet.